MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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and death. Despite its somber conclusion, in which the boys themselves
drift apart, the movie is bawdy, daring, and great fun, something almost
anathema to the faded art film market.
Films like these demonstrate anew the important role that the New
York Film Festival continues to play on the cultural scene. Once almost
entirely a venue for foreign films, most of them with little commercial
appeal, it has now become a premier showcase for an interesting mix of
imported and American independent films, and especially those with the
kind of oblique, stylized narrative that the indie aesthetic has con–
tributed to the diverse new mainstream. And because films like
Time
Out
and
Y
tu Mama Tambien
were not released commercially until the
spring, the festival served not only as a prologue to the serious film sea–
son but as a gift that keeps giving, a preview that proves instrumental
in getting these films released and reviewed. This doesn't mean that
every serious independent work arrives in New York by way of the fes–
tival. Two superb movies that rounded out the calendar year, first-time
director Todd Field's
In the Bedroom
and the seventy-six-year-old vet–
eran Robert Altman's
Gosford Park,
came out in the November–
December crush, when the critics' organizations were giving their
awards and critics were overwhelmed by a torrent of new releases. Yet
each found a devoted, though not huge, audience. Field's movie was an
intimately realistic drama about a couple whose life comes apart when
their son is murdered by his girlfriend's violent, estranged husband. Alt–
man's film was, of all things, a lighthearted English country-house mys–
tery with an immense cast, both upstairs and downstairs, that combined
an Agatha Christie whodunit with the social comedy and elegiac c1ass–
consciousness of Renoir's
Rules of the Game.
Different as they were,
both movies were powered by terrific acting, precise, sensitive direction,
and a meticulously realized milieu. The restrained, understated perfor–
mances by Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, and Marisa Tomei in Field's
film were matched by the showy, bravura acting of Maggie Smith,
Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, and Kristin Scott Thomas among Alt–
man's icy aristocrats and Derek Jacobi, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Emily
Watson, Richard E. Grant, and Eileen Atkins as their watchful retain–
ers. Only Altman could have put the cream of the British stage into
below-stairs service.
These are exhilarating movies but both have their flaws. As their
son's killer seems, rather incredibly, to be getting off the hook, Wilkin–
son's and Spacek's grief turns toward revenge, and while this brings out
the tensions in their own marriage, it shifts the movie, with its troubling
and problematic ending, closer to a genre film.
Gosford Park,
on the
